Google plans to build gigawatts of clean power and data centers together

Big tech companies need enormous amounts of clean energy to power their rapidly growing data-center fleets while meeting their climate goals — but it’s increasingly difficult to get that electricity from the grid. 

One solution? Start building data centers and solar, wind, and battery farms in close proximity to each other, putting as little pressure on the grid as possible. 

On Tuesday, Google unveiled a first-of-its-kind strategic partnership to do exactly that. The tech giant and its partners aim to build $20 billion in renewable-energy and energy-storage assets by 2030 that will be ​“colocated” with data centers. 

Procuring carbon-free energy has become a top priority as Google and other major tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta scramble to build the data centers required to achieve their artificial-intelligence visions. Sourcing enough carbon-free power to fuel these energy-intensive facilities is not easy given the country’s tangled and backlogged transmission grids, but it’s a necessity if these firms are to meet their ambitious clean energy targets. 

Google’s partners in this effort are TPG Rise Climate, the climate investment arm of TPG, a private equity firm with $239 billion under management, and Intersect Power, an energy developer that’s raised more than $1 billion in equity and $5 billion in project finance with the express purpose of connecting gigawatts of solar, wind, and battery projects directly to massive new electricity loads — including data centers. 

Intersect Power is already financing the partnership’s first colocated clean energy project, which is expected to start operating at an undisclosed site in 2026 and be fully complete by 2027. As part of Tuesday’s deal, Intersect Power also announced that it had raised more than $800 million in an equity investment round led by TPG Rise Climate and including Google and other current investors.

“We’re looking at siting next to power generation and creating these industrial parks — still connected to the grid at the substation or interconnection point, but removing the bottlenecks to bringing generation online and also loads online,” Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of data center energy, told Canary Media. ​“Where we can implement this strategy, we think it’s a great way to reduce grid stress and make new load as clean as possible.” 

That’s the theory at least. To date, Intersect Power’s 2.2 gigawatts of solar and 2.4 gigawatt-hours of battery projects in California and Texas have all been grid-connected. Providing stable, round-the-clock power directly to data centers using solar and wind farms backed up by batteries, fossil-gas generators, and minimal grid power is a largely untested prospect. 

But Intersect Power CEO Sheldon Kimber has insisted for years that much more cheap clean power will be needed than is currently being added to the grid because of the massive new electricity loads like data centers, green hydrogen production, direct air capture of carbon dioxide, electrification of industrial thermal loads, and large-scale EV-charging depots. 

“We see this as BYOP — bring your own power,” Kimber told Canary Media. ​“And the more BYOP you can achieve, the lower the impact on the localized grid,” plus there’s ​“enormous positive impact on rural areas of building billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure.” 

“In certain places in the country — the panhandle of Texas, Oklahoma, into Kansas — where the wind resource is good and the solar resource is good enough, with the addition of battery storage, you can get to a place where 80 percent-ish of the hours of the year are powered on-site by clean energy,” he said. 

Building the data centers where the clean power is 

To date, the challenge for Kimber’s vision has been convincing customers to locate big new projects in the parts of the country where wind and solar are most plentiful. But the boom in electricity demand from data centers has given Intersect Power a chance to put its theory into action. 

New data from consultancy Grid Strategies finds that forecasts of new electricity demand on the U.S. grid have skyrocketed in the past two years from 23 gigawatts in 2022 to nearly 128 GW as of December 2024, with data centers driving the lion’s share of expected growth. 

This surge is threatening the nation’s decarbonization goals as utilities plan to build gigawatts of new fossil-gas power plants and keep coal plants open longer to support it. It’s near impossible for utilities to add energy capacity at the speed tech firms desire; it can take up to five years to build and connect a new energy project, but only a year or so to bring a new data center online. 

In a September report, the Sierra Club called on tech giants and data-center developers to demand cleaner alternatives from utilities and regulators, such as more renewable energy paired with batteries and more transmission lines to share clean power between regions, in order to prevent the data-center buildout from derailing climate goals. But it also called on large power users to site new loads in parts of the country where more clean power is available. 

“It’s clear this AI boom is pushing utilities to build really, really fast,” Laurie Williams, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign and co-author of the September report, told Canary Media. ​“And if you do want to build really fast” — and keep clean energy commitments, she added — ​“don’t go to constrained parts of the country.” 

For its part, Google has pledged to power its data centers with round-the-clock carbon-free energy by 2030. That target is now threatened by Google’s growing appetite for power to feed its cloud-computing and AI ambitions and by the increasing challenge of getting new clean power built and connected to the grid. The company reported in July that its emissions rose 13 percent in 2023 from the previous year and 48 percent since 2019. 

“We’re trying to think about colocation as forward-looking,” Peterson Corio said. ​“How can we plan for this better, and make sure any new load we’re building, we’re building new generation to match it? We think this is a critical piece of ensuring we continue to do this the right way.” 

Over the past year, tech giants have been eyeing nuclear power as a potential source of round-the-clock carbon-free energy. But an effort by Amazon to secure existing nuclear power for a data center recently ran into a hurdle, and Kimber points out that new nuclear plants can’t be built quickly enough to meet near-term demand from data centers. He fears the emphasis on nuclear power is preventing data-center developers from focusing on a far faster pathway to achieving higher levels of clean power — colocation with renewable power and batteries, with fossil-gas generation filling in gaps. 

Kimber emphasized that Intersect Power’s partnership with Google doesn’t envision using fossil-gas backup power, but it could be a viable option in places where clean power resources can be built to supply a majority of a site’s needs with round-the-clock carbon-free electricity. Data centers could deploy relatively cheap on-site gas-fired generators much more quickly than utilities could build massive gas-fired power plants, and then the data centers could replace them with batteries or other zero-carbon resources as they become more readily available and cost-effective. That would be a lot better than saddling utility customers with the cost of new gas plants that may well become uncompetitive against ever-cheaper renewables, he said. 

Peterson Corio said that Google’s ongoing work with geothermal energy providers like Fervo Energy, and its efforts to contract for long-duration energy storage, are laying the groundwork for eventually achieving 100 percent around-the-clock clean power. So are its experiments in replacing diesel backup generators with batteries that can help support the grid, and in shifting computing from one data center to another to use more clean and less dirty power. 

“Our goal is to get to fully decarbonized [power] on an hourly basis,” she said. ​“Where there are opportunities where we can do that on day one, we absolutely want to do that. Where that can’t be done, we’re trying to design to optimize to that point and get there as quickly as possible.” 

The barriers to clean ​“energy parks” 

Google, Intersect, and TPG have so far shared few details on how they intend to tackle the specific challenges to siting, permitting, and building the infrastructure needed for these colocated clean-power and data-center projects. They’ll have their work cut out for them. The challenges are legion and the solutions are still a work in progress.

Intersect has already started working through some of these difficulties for its first foray into colocated developments, Project Meitner, located in a remote corner of northern Texas. That project aims to build 340 megawatts of solar and 460 MW of wind generation to supply a 400 MW hydrogen electrolysis facility and send excess electrons to the grid. 

Think tank Energy Innovation released a report on Monday that highlights the Meitner project as one of the first real-world instances of ​“how large electricity consumers across the country could leverage similar benefits — speed, direct access, shared infrastructure, and credit for clean energy — in an ​‘energy park.’”

“[T]hese clean energy resources are attracting retail customers and wholesale loads that are willing to assume additional costs, risks and responsibilities that have traditionally been addressed by existing markets and utilities in return for getting faster and cheaper access to clean energy,” report authors Eric Gimon, Mark Ahlstrom, and Mike O’Boyle wrote. 

But building them won’t be easy. To start, these kinds of projects will likely face challenges from utilities that hold monopoly rights over generating and delivering electricity to customers in most of the U.S. ​“This isn’t a solution we can deploy everywhere in the country today,” Peterson Corio said. 

One key potential exception is Texas, where deregulation has split up utility monopolies, and where clean energy is growing more quickly than any other state. But even permissive energy markets and permitting regimes don’t make energy parks a slam dunk. To realize their full potential, these projects will still have to figure out how to interconnect to the grid at large. 

Google, Intersect, and TPG aren’t proposing to build projects that are completely disconnected from the grid. Taking that route would impose significant infrastructure costs and bar them from being able to sell their clean power to others. 

“Ideally we’d like to be connected to the grid — but we don’t want to be a burden on the grid,” Kimber said. 

To connect to the grid, these energy parks will have to contend with energy-market regulations and grid-reliability rules that have yet to evolve to support this kind of combination of power supply and demand at such a large scale, even if bundling generation and load behind a single point of interconnection to the grid can simplify the process. Normally, the data center and each energy resource would need its own distinct interconnection agreement. 

Kimber didn’t downplay the complexities ahead. ​“These are all very much challenges,” he said. ​“I think in Texas, most of them are solved. That’s why you see a lot of folks coming to Texas, and why our Meitner project is located there.” 

“But you’re starting to see state governments and other folks understand that the core of economic development going forward — electrification of heavy industry environments — is fixing these commercial and technical problems with co-sited and colocated electrical industrial loads,” he continued. ​“We are years ahead of most folks in understanding the technical and regulatory hurdles of colocated load. Now we’re at a point where the world needs that knowledge more than anyone thought.”

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